>The disc drive can receive commands to read conventional DVDs and some IOS contained hidden calls to send those commands. This was particularly worrying for piracy reasons.<p>AFAIK this was worrying enough for someone from Team Twiizers to try actually contacting Nintendo about it. I don't remember if it was bushing or marcan that tried to reach out, but Nintendo's response was to... ignore them, then cyberstalk them and call their employer. As a "two can play at that game" move, when Nintendo blocked the first title ID the Homebrew Channel used (HAXX), they changed it to JODI instead, referencing the name of Nintendo's current head of antipiracy operations.<p>I'd add a citation to HackMii but I wasn't able to find the actual post. Though I did see a <i>lot</i> of callout posts against various idiots trying to resell the Homebrew Channel. And callout posts against one particular idiot building really terrible piracy tools that would install a bunch of modified firmwares to your system, which risked bricking it... because Nintendo's system engineering was actually not that much better.<p>Yeah, one thing this article didn't quite get across is how fragile the Wii system software is. strcmp on hashes is just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, Team Twiizers would regularly dissuade people from playing around with custom channel banners because it was very, very, very easy to make one that would brick your System Menu if installed. And if you did that there was no recovery (at least, not until bootmii/boot2).